The present invention relates to an apparatus for applying closures to containers.
In particular, the present invention relates to closures having a dispensing device and being downwardly provided with a tube for extracting the liquid contained in the containers.
In the following description, the containers at issue will be termed bottles without thereby causing the invention to lose generality.
According to the prior art, the actual operation of applying a closure of the above described kind to a bottle, which is often performed by screwing, must be preceded by the insertion of said tube through the neck of said bottle. This insertion is difficult, since the tubes applied to the closures are usually made of thin flexible plastic material and are often not rectilinear but curved to a greater or smaller extent. This fact does not allow to insert said tubes in the bottles by simply superimposing them on said bottles and then moving them axially downward, but requires particular measures.
In order to allow the insertion of the tubes inside the necks of the bottles, it has been proposed to bring a rectilinear guiding element transversely near to said tubes before said insertion is performed, said rectilinear element being essentially constituted by a tubular element which is laterally provided with a slot for the passage of a tube. Said guiding element is brought adjacent to each tube while said tube is located above the bottle into which the tube is to be inserted, so as to accommodate said tube inside said guiding element through said slot and so as to deform said tube until it becomes substantially rectilinear. The guiding element and the tube contained therein are then lowered by a small amount, and as soon as the free end of the tube enters the neck of the bottle the guiding element moves away and the insertion of the tube in the bottle can be completed simply by lowering it.
Such a solution is however not always sufficient to make each tube substantially rectilinear at the beginning of its insertion into a bottle, since if said tube is curved along a direction which is opposite to the direction of entry into said slot the insertion into said guiding element does not influence in any way the curvature of the tube, which is thus unable to correctly enter the neck of the respective bottle.